The term “grace” refers to unmerited gifts of God, among which might be gifts of knowledge. Does God offer knowledge over and above what we could have learned just through the still earlier gift of our inbuilt reasoning powers? At stake is the authenticity of the deeds, and the truth of the teachings, recorded in Holy Scripture. Thomas Aquinas always takes natural reason as far as he can before turning to what God has revealed by grace; he wants us to trust Revelation, but only authentic Revelation. Now, though, he turns the inquiry around. In order to know all that we need to know about God, do we need His grace at all? This inquiry amplifies the one in Question 1, Article 1.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

This essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.

This chapter turns to Augustine’s account of his own Christian conversion in Confessions. It offers a new account of what Augustine thought it meant to be a Christian – in particular, this chapter finds that the idea of God as the saviour of sinners (and therefore the giver of virtue) stood at the heart of Augustine’s conception of Christianity. This finding allows this chapter to show that Augustine’s intellectual and moral conversion coincided in the garden in Milan and also that Augustine made his criticisms of Manicheanism and Platonism from within the eudaimonist tradition.

This chapter focuses upon the Holy Spirit’s renovating work in the heart of the individual believer. Wholly by grace, the Spirit turns sinful humanity from the love of nothingness to the love of God, creating in the hearts of those being redeemed Christ’s own human desires.

After a general survey attention is first paid to the transformations Shintoism has undergone over the centuries, with its present stress on the environment used to illumine tensions in Christianity between the transcendent and the immanent. With Buddhism two very different forms are contrasted, Zen and Pure Land. With the former modern American, English and European appropriations are first analysed, including the work of Jack Kerouac, Charles Johnson, D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. Thereafter, a positive value is assigned to Zen aesthetics (especially in its positive evaluation of impermanence), while a more critical assessment is offered of its ’emptiness’ doctrine. Various versions of Pure Land are then discussed. Not only is Karl Barth’s negative judgement firmly rejected but also its notions of grace treated as illuminating for Christianity’s own approach to the subject.

This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.

Abstract: There is a fundamental need to understand and improve the errors and uncertainties associated with estimates of seasonal snow analysis and prediction. Over the past few decades, snow cover remote sensing techniques have increased in accuracy, but the retrieval of spatially and temporally continuous estimates of snow depth or snow water equivalent remains challenging tasks. Model-based snow estimates often bear significant uncertainties due to model structure and error-prone forcing data and parameter estimates. A potential method to overcome model and observational shortcomings is data assimilation. Data assimilation leverages the information content in both observations and models while minimising inherent limitations that result from uncertainty. This chapter reviews current snow models, snow remote sensing methods, and data assimilation techniques that can reduce uncertainties in the characterisation of seasonal snow.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

The chapter on sacraments in general and baptism and confirmation in particular, follows the formulation of the decree of the seventh session, from the list of heretical propositions idenifying their authors and meanings, to the conciliar discussions of them, to the draft decrees, and their final wording. It points to misunderstanidngs and polemical stances that ecumenical dialogue can help to bridge.